Choosing the Best Solution to Store your data

Your small business isn’t going to remain small forever. There will come the time when all the influx of information will prove to be too taxing on your resources, requiring you to take requisite actions. All those emails, documents, PowerPoint presentations, and video files need to be stored somewhere. And as they grow larger in size, you will not only need the right storage device but also the processing power to handle the growing demand for storage.

Thanks to government regulations like the Sarbanes Oxley Act, businesses are now required to maintain a backup of their data which they would have deleted in different circumstances. It makes sense legally for smaller businesses to document every stage of their company’s growth, which is why it is common for them to store email records that date back to 5 years.

Thanks to the internet, spammers and scammers alike have found a breeding ground to spread malware and viruses to unwitting users. Even after all your contingency plans and antivirus programs, you’re never too careful and something as simple and downloading something as simple as a spam email could cripple your data storage systems forever.

This makes it important to make vigilant backups, so you’re always prepared.

The software applications and processing power needed to handle all this growing data are complex, demanding more hard drive space than ever before. Whether you’re using enterprise software or just storing data, investing in a comprehensive data storage solution has become the need of the hour.

Not all data types are the same, video files will consume large hard drive real estate than text documents. In many cases, you’re better off deploying different types of solutions depending on the kind of data you have. The best companies have a combination of several storage solutions to cater to different types of data.

As a small business you have to answer a few questions before getting started, these include:

Age of the data

Relevancy of the data

How quickly you want to access the data

Where do you want this data to become available

Once you’re able to answer the how, when and where of your business, you’ll be in a much better position to make a decision.

Storage Solutions

Small businesses now have access to robust storage devices that were only available to more resourceful companies; these include flash memory, external hard drives, and even cloud storage. Let’s discuss some of these solutions.

Thumb Drives

These storage devices consume low power and are used by professionals for more mobile applications. Flash drives are small enough to fit on key chains, and their biggest advantage is that they have no moving parts to them, unlike conventional hard drives that have spinning discs that could get damaged as a result of moving too much.

External Hard Drives

These hard drives are bulky and store a mammoth amount of data, but what they have in size, they more than make up for in price because external hard drives are incredibly economical. The only caveat is that they are especially vulnerable to fires and other disasters. Which means you need to make a backup copy of their contents otherwise the data will remain unprotected.